Why there is no such thing as luck, according to this entrepreneur and reality TV star

Hi there, I’m Anne Kaplan Mulholland and I am a career portfolioist. I’m a doctor in finance. I run and operate many companies including finance, insurance, multiple real estate companies, and I’m a television personality. These are my biggest lessons. Look at your career path as a journey. Picture a moving sidewalk. You’re stepping on that sidewalk, and you’re going through your career, your life, and you’re working toward the ultimate goal of success. You bring people onto that moving sidewalk that work for you, that work with you, and you keep them beside you, including family, relationships and business people. And those that don’t work, you step them off that sidewalk. You’re always moving forward. That includes the tools, the life lessons, all of the business lessons that you learn. They stay on that sidewalk with you when I was on my career path, and I still am, remember, it’s a journey. I bring in people that are good for me and I know will be good for the future. I keep contacts. I make notes in my contacts so I can look back at that. They’re on that path with me. And later on, when I need to get something or when I need someone to help me, I have looked at them. They’re on that journey with me and I can recall and I can call them up and I can get them to help me. You are the brand. I think of myself as a predictable person, as a smart, compassionate person. I think of myself as a brand, and I portray myself that way in every interaction. A brand is predictable. So what kind of brand do you want to be? If you want to be someone who is always late, who isn’t interested, that will become your brand. So think about it and think about it. In every action, in every business decision you make and every interaction you have, be a predictable brand. And that is how you what you say, how you portray yourself, how you dress. There’s no right or wrong way. It is the brand that you create that becomes you, the predictable. You keep gaining knowledge and not necessarily by education. It can be by any interaction or anything you do in life but keep gaining knowledge. For example, while I was working, I also did my doctorate in finance, my MBA, my master’s in science. I did my corporate governance designation. But I also took courses like Adobe Photoshop and courses in AI. And while I was doing that, I sat on committees. I attended conferences. Those types of things help you to gain knowledge. Attending conferences and listening to lectures also helps you. Malcolm Gladwell, for example. He kind of changed my life. He told us about how to look at a room and how to look at life. Watch things like master class. Gain knowledge by being present, by being into learning. Understand that learning is part of being a Better Business person. Always look for opportunities. Remember, there’s an opportunity in everything. There is no such thing as luck. Luck is where preparedness finds and recognizes an opportunity. There is no such thing as bad luck too. That is, when you’re not accountable for something, always look for an opportunity. I’ve written magazine articles. I’ve done many things in my life where I look for the opportunity to be able to grow, to be able to contribute to my business mind. Always look for those opportunities. Now, when you say that there is no such thing as luck, if what you’re not open, if you’re not aware, you will not recognize when an opportunity comes in front of you. There was one time when I was down in the Caribbean having dinner with a Canadian banker. Now we had had issues with our company where we couldn’t get creditors life or disability insurance for loans. Big companies were shutting down in Canada because it wasn’t a big enough business for them. But we needed that business. So I’m having dinner with this banker and I said, you know, aren’t you bored down here in the Caribbean? There’s nothing to do with Canadians. And he said, no, actually there’s a lot of Canadian insurance companies down in the Caribbean. And I’m thinking, huh, you know what? There’s insurance companies down in the Caribbean. I could open an insurance company and bring that back up to Canada ultimately. And it wasn’t easy, I opened an insurance company and that is thriving to this day. If I hadn’t recognized that there was an opportunity that I wasn’t prepared to go and do something about it and didn’t recognize that there was a solution in front of me, I wouldn’t be able to do that. Figure out how to solve problems. Now you’re in it for the long game, always the long game, but figure out how to solve the short term problems. When you figure out how to solve problems, you find solutions and you learn how to solve things in the future. So while you’re figuring out how to solve a problem, you’re also trying to figure out how to run a business. Now, many of the great business ideas are people solving problems. For example, my parents were all doctors, they were medical doctors. There was an eye doctor and my mother was a psychologist. My stepfather was a dentist and they would talk about how we would move to A2 tiered system. So in Canada, not unlike in the UK, we have very good medical systems. However, they were saying in future we might go to two tiered and I thought, I wonder how people are going to pay for their medical issues or their medical problems in the future when we can’t access managed care. So I started a company that would finance medical procedures that’s non asset based lending. I started that company in 1996 while 25 years later we had done over $2 billion in medical loans. We moved into different verticals all by me just solving a problem, how are people going to fund medical procedures. So remember going up for the long game, solve the problems in the short term and keep on solving those problems. You will be successful in business. You are not that smart. When you think you’re too smart, you will fail. Remember, good business and good business decisions are through hard work, through being aware, through thinking big. But it’s not thinking that you are too smart to fail. When you do that, you will fail.